Brazilian funk as the herald of a new social order: a semiotic analysis of the internet music video “Beijinho no ombro” and its reception in social media

Abstract

The present article aims to analyze the music video “Beijinho no ombro” – a major Brazilian social media phenomenon that reached more than 9 million Youtube views in 3 months in 2014 –, discussing both the processes by which homologies between categories of expression and content are established – the so called Hjelmslev’s “commutations” – and suspended – the Danish linguist’s concept of “syncretism” (Hjelmslev, 2003) – in the audiovisual text, and the effects of meaning created thereby. The analytical treatment assimilates also some of Éric Landowski’s contributions to the discussions about the intersubjective interactions regimes (Landowski, 1997, 2006) and their impact on the study of the socalled states of soul deeply developed by Greimas and Fontanille in their Sémiotique des passions (Greimas & Fontanille, 1993). The object analysis intends moreover to illustrate a methodological approach proposed by the author and that may be applied to various corpora regarding the audiovisual repertory. Such an approach, a natural extension of Greimas’ treatment of the plane of content and Floch’s developments into the plane of expression (Floch, 1984, 1993), offers as a contribution the proposition of a methodology that, departing from the figures of expression and their homologations and semi-symbolic relations with categories of content, will then detect their projections in each one of the three levels of the generative path. Thus, not only the role of the means of manifestation in the process of generation of effects of meaning can be better evaluated, but also the possibilities of a generative approach that includes the textual structures – rather than the explicit exclusion that appears in the Dictionary of semiotics (Greimas & Courtés, 1991:208) – can be further discussed.